Earlier this year, Bill Gates was asked, “If you were 20 years old now, what would you do? Which area?” Gates responded, “When it comes to technology, there are four areas where I think a lot of exciting things will happen in the coming decades: big data, machine learning, genomics, and ubiquitous computing. So, if I were 20 years old today, I’d be looking into one of those fields.” Bill Gates doesn’t have many regrets about dropping out; we can all agree that things worked out pretty well for him. However, not spending time looking into these world-changing fields is his “one big regret from the time I spent in college.” Mr. Gates alludes to how academic institutions can afford students the opportunity to explore such world-transforming fields. While no one doubts that college dropouts are often successful, I believe that those who aspire to truly revolutionize cutting-edge computing could best develop the foundations needed to do so in an academic setting.

While there is much to be said for application-based, self-taught learning, some skills are best developed in an academic setting. Even for the nerdiest of us, proof-based linear algebra can be incredibly dry. More importantly, learning it alone is all but impossible. “Here, let me close Codecademy, take a break from my Backbone app, and crack open a linear algebra textbook to re-prove things that we already know to be true,” says no hacker ever. Coders chose practical over abstract every chance they get. But that is exactly what school, grades and tests are for: school is an opportunity for students to learn things they otherwise wouldn’t. While many people in school lament the time they’re forced to learn proof techniques and abstract mathematics, it is generally safe to admit that we never would have learnt these topics without being forced to. Schools don’t need to teach HTML or baseball statistics; students have an excess of internal motivation to study those topics. How many students out there claim to hate math or not be good with numbers but know a ton about the analytics of baseball? School is an opportunity to learn these complex, dry concepts that you might never approach without the assistance of a teaching staff and the motivation of a letter grade.

But even once you get past the dry fundamentals, the development of cutting-edge technology is still incredibly challenging. However, an academic environment can lower the barriers to explore such complex areas that might not be accessible via “messing around” by oneself. While most freshman do not enter college with an understanding of big data, machine learning, genomics, or ubiquitous computing, they are afforded access to thought-leaders in these fields in the classroom everyday. We sometimes forget that cutting-edge tech is often developed by bearded professors and PhD students.

The most prominent example of this is Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s famed thesis that proposed what would become Google’s PageRank and would eventually lead to one of the world’s most successful startups. These startup success stories out of academic still happen today. Take a company like Ayasdi out of Stanford’s Math department, for example. Ayasdi has created an incredibly robust and flexible tool by using properties of topology to visualize and analyze data. I remember my internal reaction when my middle school Math teacher first taught topology, “When the hell am I ever going to use this stuff?” Little did I know that I would later intern at a company that was using topology to change how we look at and gain insights from data. Technologies such as Ayasdi’s and Google’s involved years of research and development and would have been nearly impossible to develop outside the cradle of academia. Furthermore, it would have been entirely impossible to build develop these solutions without having the foundational mathematical, statistical, and systems knowledge that is acquired in school.

However, in recent years, individuals such as Peter Thiel have argued that entrepreneurs should leave school and are even incentivizing entrepreneurs to drop out. And it’s not difficult to see why. Recent college dropouts include Mark Zuckerberg, David Karp (Tumblr), and historical ones include Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Just looking at the data, it seems like it takes a lack of a college degree to found a billion-dollar tech company. When I started at Stanford, my vision of entrepreneurship was based on those assumptions. I aspired to create a web or mobile app, and even admitted to my parents the possibility that I would drop out if the right opportunity arose. I quickly realized, however, how low these aspirations were: building an app is simple. With Stack Overflow, great documentation, and a plethora of tutorials to copy and paste from, building an app as a programmer has become a greatly reduced challenge. Building a company or creating new technology, however, remains incredibly difficult and it requires broader learning and exposure to topics sometime not easily identifiable as pertinent in the short-term. So while a college-dropout programmer has the potential to achieve short-term success, or perhaps even become the ‘next Zuckerberg,’ once you leave school, you severely stem your opportunities for academic exploration.

At the same time, while dropping out can stunt a programmer’s intellectual potential, staying in school can expose a programmer to fields he never would have dreamt of studying. Over the past two school years, I began centering my coursework around data analytics and machine learning. In order to do so, I had to put off my immediate interests in software development to focus on my indirect interests, taking classes that developed my mathematical maturity. While these courses did not pique my current interests, they’ve since unlocked applications in machine learning and data analytics that I now find incredibly exciting. Without the resources and structure of a university, developing the pertinent foundations for such areas would’ve been impossible for me. I believe formal learning will increase a student’s eventual capability and thus increase the probability that they create breakthrough innovations in such fields as compared to the less prepared dropout.

Student entrepreneurs working in cutting-edge computing can unlock entirely new realms of innovations. Luckily, being a student can play to ones advantage in order to learn today’s state-of-the-art. However, it is herein that lies the perennial battle of the engineer: do I cash out early or invest in my education? Neither answer is universally right: we need Mark Zuckerbergs and we need Larry Pages. But one thing’s for sure: if you can fight the allure of building the next Facebook today, you could develop the technology that enables the Facebooks of tomorrow.

Neal Khosla

Is this really the kind of mindset Dorm Room Fund endorses? I understand where the writer is coming from up until the conclusion which out of nowhere seems to extrapolate that Larry and Sergey are the ruling example of great leaps in innovation while nearly trivializing the technological innovation that has come as a result of Facebook: “But one thing’s for sure: if you can fight the allure of building the next Facebook today, you could develop the technology that enables the Facebooks of tomorrow.”

This statement is ludicrous.

JJ Zolper

I think the time you spend trying to over analyze his point and the message within is the only issue. If you spent your time being resourceful and learning new concepts (there is much to be discovered outside of school) you’d be able to affirm that the school system is broken and for the amount of effort invested you can run circles around even the brightest college students of today.

Steven Krouse

Do you really think so? I would argue that that sentence points out the technological difficulty in building Facebook as compared to Google. While Mark hacked together FB in PHP, Larry and Sergey had to spend years developing a scalable way to make Google even remotely possible. BigTable, Hadoop, PageRank are all technologies that enabled Facebook to exist and would have never been possible if Larry and Sergey had taken the time to learn linear algebra.

The piece doesn’t argue that Larry and Sergey are the landmark example of great innovation: we all know you don’t need a college degree to innovate. It merely points out that Google built a technology that enables innovation, while Facebook is a innovation that enables innovation.

David Fontenot

It doesn’t merely point that out though, Steven. Have you read the conclusion?

“But one thing’s for sure: if you can fight the allure of building the next Facebook today, you could develop the technology that enables the Facebooks of tomorrow.”

The author clearly seems to imply, that trying to build the next Facebook now hinders your ability to develop the technology that enables the Facebook of tomorrow. I think this is very misguided.

Steven Krouse

Fair point. I guess it’s just a difference of opinion

David Fontenot

We can call just about anything a difference of opinion. It has been proven over and over again and is consensus in the startup community that building a value/customer-driven venture is much more efficient and effective than trying to modify technology to provide a solution somewhere in the market.

So much tech is built and energy is wasted doing so.

Chad Huber

Karp shouldn’t be mentioned in the same vain as Zuck / Jobs / Gates. He should be replaced with Jack.

Anonymous

“I believe that those who aspire to truly revolutionize cutting-edge computing could best develop the foundations needed to do so in an academic setting.” It’s the word “best” here that really troubles me; anecdotal examples of one vs. another startup founder do little to nothing for this argument. Your closing line is nearly insulting, and it is narrow-minded to assume that an academic setting is “best” at supporting self-motivated powerhouses like Stanford dropouts…

David Fontenot

It worries me that FRC supports this type of mindset. While I agree that some innovation does come from academia. I think we can all agree that working from technology and research to try to solve a problem is an almost backwards approach to startups.

Startups are about solving problems. Working from a problem back to its solution.

Yes, sometimes innovations in technology allow new problems to be solved; however, taking that direction has been proven over and over again to be the wrong approach to startups and innovation in general.

Alex Ginsberg

David, I can’t say whether FRC supports this particular mindset, since I’m not an FRC Partner. Neither is Neal; he’s speaking from his own experience. As for Dorm Room Fund, we have some people who support Neal’s view and some who are closer to your mindset.

On to the substance of your comments, I’m interested in hearing more about this statement:

“working from technology and research to try to solve a problem is an almost backwards approach to startups”.

If your point is that startups should focus first on what they’re trying to fix instead of building something uber-cool without a specific problem in mind, I agree. However, does it follow that staying in school/participating in research is the same as “working from technology and research to solve a problem”?

David Fontenot

There’s nothing wrong with building something uber-cool without a specific problem in mind; you are just much less likely to build the next Facebook or the technology that enables the Facebooks of tomorrow.

School is a cradle that distances you from customer-driven development for the most part, especially when doing research. Incentives are simply misaligned — you are trying to raise another grant, not necessarily build something that actually gets used.

Since apparently using anecdotal examples as universal thresholds is an acceptable standard here, I’d like to throw this one into the mix: Stripe. The Collison brothers. These two are testament to the kinds of powerful companies you can build having dropped out of school. “Missed the boat”? I would beg to differ. They took advantage of a time-sensitive opportunity to solve a gigantic problem, and now they have a billion dollar company bringing value to millions of people.

Additionally, your accusation that dropouts are motivated by “cashing out early” is completely insulting.